Julia Longoria: A heads up, this episode has stories of abortion and pregnancy loss. 

Julia Longoria: I’m Julia Longoria. This is More Perfect. 

George Frampton: I don't have any particular pride in the original Roe v. Wade decision. I mean I never really thought about the viability of viability. [chuckles]

Julia Longoria: Last week, we heard from a judge and a clerk, two of the men who, 50 years ago, tried to answer the question of abortion in America. 

Judge Jon Newman: I just thought, you can't abolish her right. But you can limit it. 

Julia Longoria: And they settled on a compromise, one that was flawed from the start, the viability line. Now, the Supreme Court has thrown out that line. And lawmakers across the country are scrambling to write new lines. New rules for when it’s legal to get an abortion or if it’s legal at all.

[OYEZ THEME: Oyez. Oyez. Oyez.]

Julia Longoria: Today on More Perfect. Chapter 2 of our two part series. What if abortion law wasn’t shaped by men at the Supreme Court? What if it was written by people who know what it’s like to be pregnant?

Mary Browning: I don't think people see me as a person that would've had an abortion.

Jill Lens:  I resent anybody else trying to define what had happened to me. 

Dr. Shelley Sella: I think I always go back to, we have to look at what drives someone to have an abortion and why is that person at 26, 27, 28 weeks desperate to have an abortion? What are the circumstances? That's the key.

[OYEZ THEME: United States and this Honorable Court. Oyez. Oyez.]

Julia Longoria: Stories of women who fought battles within their own bodies and who now find themselves on the front lines of the next legal battle over abortion in America.

Julia Longoria: This is More Perfect, I’m Julia Longoria. 

Julia Longoria: For every case the Supreme Court decides, members of the public, people not involved in the case can submit additional arguments for either side. They’re called amicus briefs. The Court usually sees about a dozen per case. But in Dobbs, there were more than 140. Amicus briefs allow the justices to try on new arguments for size. They could be the basis of tomorrow’s decisions. And one brief in particular stood out to reporter, Gabrielle Berbey. 

[Phone Ring]

Mary Browning: Good morning.

Gabrielle Berbey: Hi, is this Mary?

Mary Browning: This is Mary.

Gabrielle Berbey: Mary Browning is a lawyer who wrote a brief on behalf of the Justice Foundation. 

Mary Browning: I think the best way to sum it up is when does life begin? It begins at the beginning. 

Gabrielle Berbey: It’s an anti-abortion, Christian organization. And in one sense, her argument wasn't very surprising. She wants to move the viability line all the way back to conception. 

Mary Browning: a person is a person no matter how small. A person is a person no matter which side of the uterine wall. 

Gabrielle Berbey: Her reasoning is that with technology like in vitro fertilization, you can make even an embryo in a petri dish “viable.” And this kind of argument is gaining momentum in the courts. It’s called personhood. The idea that a fetus, from the moment of conception, has constitutional rights, banning all abortions.

Gabrielle Berbey: What made you get connected with the Justice Foundation? 

Mary Browning: I really got connected with the Justice Foundation, from my own experience as having been a person that has experienced abortion.

Gabrielle Berbey: Wow. Thank you for sharing that. I – I didn't know that. Um… 

Mary Browning: It would be easier not to say anything, but I don't know that it's, there's wisdom in that. 

Gabrielle Berbey: Yeah.

Gabrielle Berbey: Mary felt, in order for me to understand how someone who has had an abortion becomes anti-abortion, I had to understand the story of what happened to her as a teenager. 

Mary Browning: I was 18. I had just graduated high school. 

Gabrielle Berbey: It was 1976. She was living in small-town Missouri with Catholic parents. And at 18 years old, she was engaged. 

Mary Browning: I was getting married to an abusive alcoholic. And I found out a week before our wedding that I was pregnant. When I called him, he said, well, you'll need to have an abortion and I think I was surprised that he said that. But I couldn't imagine going home and talking to my parents by myself. And so I just said, okay.

Gabrielle Berbey: Mary felt conflicted, but...  

Mary Browning: I think at the time, what was being said was you just have a clump of cells. It doesn't really matter…

Gabrielle Berbey: Just three years earlier, the Supreme Court had decided Roe v. Wade, and made abortion legal up until the viability line. 

Mary Browning: The U.S. Supreme Court said it was okay. So it must be okay. 

Gabrielle Berbey: So Mary booked the appointment. And five days after her wedding, she had an abortion. 

Mary Browning: During the abortion, I dissociated. 

Gabrielle Berbey: She says afterwards, the doctor scolded her. She’d thought she was 12 weeks along, but he told her it was more like 16 weeks. And that she should’ve known better. That haunted her.

Mary Browning: I felt shame that I was having sex. I felt shame that I was pregnant. I felt shame that I'd had an abortion. So I thought I would, could kind of hide the secret and never have to deal with it. I sort of put it in a compartment and closed the door in my brain. And it's like, okay, that problem was taken care of. Now I'm gonna live my life.

Gabrielle Berbey: She eventually left her abusive husband, went to law school, and became a lawyer. She practiced family law and specialized in child abuse and neglect cases. And that whole time, she kept her abortion a secret.

Mary Browning: I didn't talk to people about it for years. It wasn't like I had girlfriends and I talked to my girlfriends about it. I didn't tell anybody.

Gabrielle Berbey: But as she was living her life, Mary says the shame and the grief she felt about her abortion, they caught up with her. And she felt alone. 

Mary Browning: There was a lot of talk on the one side about how good it is and how it's the right thing, but there wasn't much talk about, no, I had one and I regretted it.

Gabrielle Berbey: What was the turning point for you?

Mary Browning: Well, I think when I met other women that were talking about having had an abortion. That’s when I had become connected with the Justice Foundation, where women that have been hurt by abortions have come forward. 

Gabrielle Berbey: The Justice Foundation doesn’t just litigate anti-abortion cases. It also offers support to people who regret their abortions. Mary got involved with the foundation, and she met other people who also regretted their abortions. Together, she said they talked about what they lost or who. 

Mary Browning: Yes. Most of us have named our babies. We have an idea of how old they would be, you know? I had an abortion and it was a mistake. Regardless of if our Supreme Court said this wasn't recognized as a human or a person. I know this was my baby. 

Gabrielle Berbey: Hmm. 

Mary Browning: I know that now. 

Gabrielle Berbey: Regret after abortion has been a major focus of the anti-abortion movement. In the 2000’s, Justice Kennedy even wrote about it in a Supreme Court opinion. And as a reaction, talk of regret around abortion became taboo in the pro-choice movement. Even though studies show the vast majority of people who’ve had abortions, more than 95%, do not regret it, even if they’ve felt grief. 

Mary Browning: I get there are women that have abortions that don't regret it. I'll just say, that's not me. 

Gabrielle Berbey: The personhood movement gave Mary kind of an answer to her grief and her regret.

Mary Browning: My child, my baby was 16 weeks old when he was aborted. It wasn't like he was a clump of cells and, and it didn't matter what happened to him.

Gabrielle Berbey: It struck me how Mary found community in the anti-abortion movement because she didn’t think anyone in the pro-abortion movement could understand her experience. But as I was doing my reporting, I found someone in the abortion rights movement who provided care for people in Mary’s situation and said some things that actually reminded me of her.

Dr. Shelley Sella: In the um, recovery rooms, we have notebooks for people to write their thoughts and feelings.

Gabrielle Berbey: Dr. Shelley Sella is an OBGYN.

Dr. Shelley Sella: I had somewhere a list of, I had some quotes.

Gabrielle Berbey: She’s retired now, but she’s kept copies of what some of her patients wrote in those notebooks.

Dr. Shelley Sella: Okay, here we go. “Dear God, please forgive me. I'm not in a good position to have a baby. I know I made the right choice. No regrets.” Someone else wrote, “May God forgive us all for we are humans. We fall short sometimes.” “I'm a Catholic and I'm not happy about the situation. But God gave us the ability to think. For us to use our judgment, and especially to be our own person.” It's easy to just think of it in black and white terms but it doesn't work. 

Gabrielle Berbey: Dr. Sella is not just any abortion provider. For almost a decade, she was one of only four people in the country to openly provide abortions at any point in a pregnancy even in the third trimester. When her patients would arrive, she’d ask them a question: 

Dr. Shelley Sella: I ask patients how would you like me to describe this being inside you? And invariably they say, baby. 

Gabrielle Berbey: Do you then see the fetus as how they see it? 

Dr. Shelley Sella: Do I personify it?

Gabrielle Berbey: Based on how your patient sees it. 

Dr. Shelley Sella: Yeah. And [sighs] that's an interesting question. If someone says, this is my baby Tom. Yeah, I guess I think of it as baby Tom. How she sees it is how I see it.

Gabrielle Berbey: This surprised me. I hadn’t heard an abortion provider say something like this before. And abortion rights scholars I talked to often insisted on using the word ‘fetus’. But, here was Dr. Sella, an all-trimester abortion provider, one of the most pro-abortion people I’d ever spoken to, saying ‘baby’ in the context of abortion.

Dr. Shelley Sella: You can have feelings. You can have feelings toward the fetus or baby, whatever you're calling it, and still know that it's the absolute right decision for you to have the abortion. Not does it look like a baby or does it look like a cotton ball? Or clump of tissue. To me that's kind of denying the reality of our work. I mean I think we have to acknowledge what we do. 

Gabrielle Berbey: Dr. Sella says that when she was just starting out, the clinic she worked at looked like a bunker. With high fences, guards, and metal detectors. She and her staff received countless death threats. And her mentor, Dr. George Tiller, was murdered while he was at church. 

Dr. Shelley Sella: Dr. Tiller was religious, and saw this work as God's work and as a moral imperative and he was determined to provide that to women who needed care. But I, but I think it was hard.

Gabrielle Berbey: How did you feel?

Dr. Shelley Sella: [pauses] I was very committed to the work. You can have feelings as the provider and still know this is the absolute right thing for this person who has come to me. And it's okay to acknowledge that sometimes it's sad and sometimes it's not and, and that's okay. It doesn't take away from the work or from the woman's right to have the abortion. 

Gabrielle Berbey: Like Mary, Dr. Sella has also been frustrated by the way the pro-choice movement has talked about abortion. It hasn’t always aligned with her experience as a provider. 

Dr. Shelley Sella: It's like if you're pro-abortion, [claps] then it's a hundred percent and you attach no emotion to it. Like, let's make it this nothing, this lifeless cardboard. But it's not! 

Gabrielle Berbey: Talking to these two people with opposite beliefs, I was surprised by how much they kept coming back to the same place.

Mary Browning: Can we just agree on certain facts? Even though we may apply them differently or we may see the outcome differently? Can we just say, this is a baby? [chuckles] 

Dr. Shelley Sella: Many people who have abortions don't think of it as a fetus. It's their baby.

Mary Browning: Let's at least have language that we agree on. 

Gabrielle Berbey: Mary and Dr. Sella also agreed that the way Roe v. Wade tried to draw lines in a pregnancy was deeply misguided.

Dr. Shelley Sella: I never thought it was a good decision to begin with, actually.

Mary Browning: When you look at viability and say that that is a compromise. It's not so much as when does life begin, but when are we as a society going to value the life?

Gabrielle Berbey: Where do you think that Justice Blackmun should have drawn that line instead?

Mary Browning: Well… 

Dr. Shelley Sella That's a great question.

Mary Browning: At the time, Justice Blackmun was saying, well we don't really know when life begins. There's no need to make something so simple, complicated.

Dr. Shelley Sella The whole structure they came up with is just too complicated. 

Gabrielle Berbey: But here the two women diverge. For Dr. Sella…

Dr. Shelley Sella: A pregnancy is viable if it's wanted and accepted and embraced, and it's non-viable if it's rejected by the mother. Why did they do this? Screwed us all over. 

Gabrielle Berbey: So if not Roe and not viability, then what? Mary found her answer in the personhood movement. And the Supreme Court is probably more open now to ideas of personhood than perhaps any other time in US history. But for Dr. Sella, the answer is less clear. She isn’t a lawyer. And it made me wonder, who in the abortion rights movement is looking for a legal answer that could reflect her experience. We talked to someone working on an answer.  

Greer Donley: For a very, very very long time, the abortion rights movement has truly wanted to ignore the fetus in any way it can. 

Gabrielle Berbey: Two people actually… 

Jill Lens: What we're envisioning is a future that abortion rights still acknowledge the fetus and that's okay.  

Gabrielle Berbey: That’s after the break. 

Julia Longoria: From WNYC Studios, this is More Perfect, I’m Julia Longoria. The second half of this episode requires a different kind of warning: we’re gonna get wonky. We’ll make it worth your while. Here’s reporter Gabrielle Berbey.

Gabrielle Berbey: Okay so let’s review for a moment: Last year, The Supreme Court threw out the viability line. And putting aside the chaos we’re living in because of that (which is hard to do) some legal scholars who we talked to are weirdly sort of relieved. Because viability made no sense. They say, now the creative solutions are endless. For people who believe in the right to an abortion, there’s a pair of lawyers I talked to who’ve been thinking about this a lot. So. We’ll start with a tale of two pregnancies from these two legal scholars.

Gabrielle Berbey: Jill Lens … 

Jill Lens: I am a professor of law at the University of Arkansas School of Law.

Gabrielle Berbey: And Greer Donley …

Greer Donley: I’m a reproductive justice scholar.

Gabrielle Berbey: … at the University of Pittsburgh. When Jill and Greer each got pregnant, they were in separate parts of the country. They did not know each other. Both were lawyers, and both in their 30s.

Jill Lens: We found out it was a boy, which was just fantastic. 

Gabrielle Berbey: What color did you paint the nursery room?

Greer Donley: It was like a sea foam green. 

Jill Lens: Actually, it happened to be Father’s Day. And I put the, [chuckles] I put the car seat in the very day. 

Greer Donley: And that all happened probably two weeks before, a week before the scan that we found out that things were going so wrong.

Gabrielle Berbey: After both of them had prepared for their babies to arrive, both Jill and Greer’s pregnancies went horribly wrong. For Jill, who lived in Texas at the time, a thing that so many pregnant people fear, happened. At almost nine months.

Jill Lens: They couldn’t find a heartbeat. The nurses all left the room, and I just let out this scream.  

Gabrielle Berbey: Her son was stillborn. 

Gabrielle Berbey: For Greer in Pittsburgh, the trouble came earlier in the pregnancy. At the 20-week scan. 

Greer Donley: The doctor basically told us that our son had a pretty profound brain anomaly that was preventing brain tissue from forming.

Gabrielle Berbey: Greer is a cancer survivor, so her pregnancy was already considered “high risk.”  

Greer Donley: The first thing the doctor said was that some people in this situation choose to have an abortion. And someone once told me people faced with this decision can choose life for their child, or they can choose peace, but they can't choose both. And what does it mean as a mother when you have to make that choice between those two things, right? When you want desperately to give your kid both of them. But you know, for me and for many women who came before me, I chose peace. And, you know, in some sense felt like it was the only gift I could give him to not suffer in this world. Um, but it was also a gift that came with profound pain for me.

Gabrielle Berbey: She had an abortion at 22 weeks.

Gabrielle Berbey: If you're comfortable with sharing, like what did you do after?

Greer Donley: I came home And, um, you know, I — I was in a really dark place for a while. The loss part of my abortion felt like I didn't know where to go. And the thing that was so strange about it was that I've been pro-choice my whole life and not just vaguely, right? I was actively involved in causes related to this issue when I was in law school. So I was not expecting to feel the kind of things I felt. Like I was losing, you know, a potential child. A a, like, I felt like I was losing a son, right?

Gabrielle Berbey: Like Mary from the personhood movement, like Dr. Sella the abortion provider, like so many people who’ve lost a pregnancy, she did not feel this was a clump of cells. She was mourning her baby.

Greer Donley: I remember someone, sent me a book and I know this person, right? This person is someone who supports abortion rights. And the book was, um, like [chuckles] was clearly an anti-abortion book. Like, this is your baby. It's been your baby from the moment you've, you've carried this baby your whole, its whole life. There was a part of me that was reading this with the emotional experience I had just been through thinking, oh yeah, like this resonates. 

Gabrielle Berbey: She couldn’t find this kind of comfort in the pro-choice literature she came across.

Greer Donley: I was feeling this conflict within me. On the one hand, I was someone who had had an abortion of 22 weeks, right? So you can't go through that experience and not, or at least I didn't go through that experience, and feel like people shouldn't have access to abortion. On the other hand, I also had never valued fetal life so much. Um, and that was the part where I felt very confused. 

Gabrielle Berbey: Over a thousand miles away, Jill, after her stillbirth experience, she was also conflicted. 

Jill Lens: When I walked out of the hospital, someone said to me, we would get Caleb's death certificate in the mail. And in my head I specifically thought, what about his birth certificate? Because I gave, I, I literally just gave birth.

Gabrielle Berbey: After Caleb was stillborn, Jill wanted a memorial birth certificate, which is something abortion rights groups have resisted. And when she wrote about the legal recognition of stillborns, her work got a reaction. 

Jill Lens: So something as simple as the language that I would use when writing about stillbirth, especially, that could be threatening to abortion rights.

Gabrielle Berbey: For Greer in Pittsburgh, her experience led her to write a paper, which made the case that abortion should be a parental right. 

Greer Donley: But that necessitates right, that there is a child for whom the parents can make decisions about. 

Gabrielle Berbey: And she got a similar reaction. 

Greer Donley: I got a lot of pushback from abortion rights people because they did not like that I was using parental frames to talk about abortion. Um – 

Gabrielle Berbey: What did that pushback look like?  

Greer Donley: It was basically this really scares me because it's gonna create a slippery slope to personhood. You know, I think there is every reason to be terrified of personhood.  Because once a fetus is a person under the law at any point in pregnancy, it will trump the woman's rights over and over again. So it's not at all that the fears around this are unfounded. It's that… What do we lose by not recognizing something that is very intuitive to so many people who've been pregnant before?

Gabrielle Berbey: Jill and Greer were both mourning and feeling alone. They’d heard about each other, in the world of legal scholars, but Greer was afraid to reach out. 

Greer Donley: I see so many pro-life narratives within the stillbirth community and the pregnancy loss community, like, I'm, I'm, I'm a, I don't, I'm not comfortable reaching out to Jill because what if she actually thought, well, you know, I lost my kid. You didn't, you, you know, whatever killed your child. Like, I judge you. I'm not gonna, I don't want to, you know, I, I was afraid of being judged.

Greer Donley: Jill, I'm gonna read this. This is a very interesting paragraph in an early email you sent,

Jill Lens: Oh, no! [giggles] 

Gabrielle Berbey: Jill was the first one to finally reach out.

Greer Donley: The personhood argument is always difficult, but I really do think the pro-choice side is overreacting. It's just re- reality that women see their unborn children as children. When the woman wants the baby, she calls it a baby. When she goes in for the ultrasound, the doctor points out the baby's foot, not the fetus's foot. It is a baby to the woman, even though the baby is still unborn. Denying this doesn't preserve abortion rights, it just denies reality. So.

Jill Lens: Yeah it's a – it's a little, it's a little strong, but I don't think it's wrong!

Gabrielle Berbey: A friendship was born, almost immediately. 

Jill Lens: And I had always thought about it but I don't know that I've ever necessarily really told you this, Greer, but it's just it's amazing to me how similar our situations are? Greer gets it. Greer gets it.

Gabrielle Berbey: Jill and Greer get in touch with each other on the anniversaries of their sons’ deaths. To them, it’s important to honor the babies that they lost. 

Greer Donley: For a lot people who are not steeped in one side or the other, you know, the fact that the abortion rights movement doesn't really have a way of thinking about fetal value is alienating because, you know, the, these are the average people who, you know, feel, you know, feelings of love for their children before they're born and experience loss that leads to profound grief, questioning what that grief is about. You know, she and I really wanted to write a paper that dove into that exact tension. And we hadn't felt like we had seen that anywhere.

Jill Lens: Because we hadn't seen it anywhere. [chuckles] 

Gabrielle Berbey: Jill and Greer wanted to find a more nuanced way of thinking about abortion and the law. 

Greer Donley: What do you do when you completely support the bodily autonomy of people, but you also really value fetal life? How do you make sense of that?  

Gabrielle Berbey: The viability line in Roe v. Wade was supposed to be an answer to that balancing act. But Greer says, the justices fundamentally misunderstood something about pregnancy when they invented that line.

Greer Donley: Viability essentially functions as this, like, on / off switch, right? Where like the, the fetus or the baby is one thing one day and then a whole other thing the next, right? And that's just not at all how people experience pregnancy, right? Some people do have a moment where they feel like it's their baby and — for some people it's a pregnancy test. For some people, it's the first time they feel the baby move. For some people it's birth, right? Um, it's gonna be different for every person.

Gabrielle Berbey: The way Jill and Greer experienced pregnancy and loss was as parents. 

Greer Donley: My abortion was kind of like, the first major parenting decision I made in my whole life.

Gabrielle Berbey: They wanted to start there. So they turned to Greer’s argument about abortion being a parental right.

Greer Donley: If parents get to make these decisions after birth, they should be able to make it before birth. 

Gabrielle Berbey: That became the first building block for Jill and Greer’s argument. 

Jill Lens: We're only talking about a parent's claim. We're not talking about a fetus having rights.

Gabrielle Berbey: They believe a person is a person under the constitution beginning at birth. But that doesn’t mean that a fetus can’t have value. They dove into the research around pregnancy loss to find out how people valued the pregnancies they lost.

Jill Lens: And some of the answers were, I lost a pregnancy, I lost a baby, I lost, you know, my child who had this name. I even had a funeral. So there was like a range of valuations. It varies. It changes.

Gabrielle Berbey: Other legal theories had tried to move the viability line across the timeline of a pregnancy to a fixed point. 

Greer Donley: I mean I think it's very natural, to think as many people do, that pregnancy progresses over time on some sort of scale. And at some point you have to draw a line. But, you know, our way of thinking is, well, what if we don’t? What if we just allow people to decide what it means to them.

Gabrielle Berbey: So how do you do that in the law?  It turns out there’s already somewhere in the law where people can tell the court how much a loss means to them. It’s this thing called tort law. 

Gabrielle Berbey: I always think of a pastry, I don’t know –

Greer Donley: Oh that’s funny I think tart. [laughs]

Jill Lens: Yeah that’s why all my students are like, wait why aren’t we talking about desserts? Um, okay… [giggles] So tort law is just personal injury law. 

Gabrielle Berbey: Think, the signs you see on buses and benches saying things like, “Have you been in a car accident?” Pregnancy loss actually turns up in tort law all the time. When it does, fetal value isn’t tied to how far along in a pregnancy you are. It’s about proving how much the pregnancy meant to the person who lost it.  Take for instance if Jill had a miscarriage because someone hit her with their car… 

Jill Lens: I would be at trial trying to prove to the jury that, you know, I loved my son, and I have to try to prove to the jury that I've suffered a lot of damages. And then the jury awards an amount of damages that's specific to my loss.

Gabrielle Berbey: The pregnant person defines their own loss to a court rather than the government defining it for them. 

Greer Donley: The state cannot come in and say, we lost something. Why? Because it's the parents' loss that matters!

Jill Lens: It's an idea of presenting fetal value that doesn't threaten abortion rights.

Gabrielle Berbey: The judge and the clerk who introduced the viability line told me, in last week’s episode, that the law is all about drawing hard lines. Of course, they said, those lines are not always going to get it right for every single person’s experience, that’s just an unavoidable consequence of having a lawful society. But part of the reason they drew it that way was because they couldn’t wrap their heads around why someone would need to have an abortion late in pregnancy.

Greer Donley: Look, I too am very uncomfortable with people getting abortions for absolutely no reason in the third trimester, right, but also it's like, because I had an abortion the second trimester, I literally know that like no one would choose to do that. If you actually look at the people who are willing to do that, almost always,  we’re talking about people who have, you know, experienced dramatic changes in their life, learned a horrible fetal anomaly, endured serious domestic violence. You know, really traumatic situations in which I think a lot of people actually would have a lot of sympathy for.

Gabrielle Berbey: Jill and Greer don’t claim to have the answer to abortion in America. But what they propose is maybe the law doesn’t have to create one, general rule for the infinitely complicated experience of pregnancy and abortion. 

Gabrielle Berbey: if you don't mind me asking, how far along are you?

Gabrielle Berbey: When I talked to Greer for this story, she was pregnant. Actually very pregnant.

Greer Donley: I'm, gosh, it's always so weird cause it's like, I'm eight months pregnant, I think, but I’m 35 weeks. 

Gabrielle Berbey: A few weeks later, I heard the news she had a healthy baby girl. 

Greer Donley: Pregnancy's really hard. It's really hard. It requires enormous sacrifice of your body, of your emotions. so why do we not trust women, right? What are we worried about? And what if we just trust them? Um, and we trust them to feel grief. We trust them to make the decisions for birth. We trust them to make decisions for abortion. We trust them to just, we just trust them. [laughs]

Alyssa Edes: More Perfect is a production of WNYC Studios. This episode was produced by Gabrielle Berbey and me, Alyssa Edes. It was edited by Jenny Lawton and Emily Siner, with help from Julia Longoria. 

Fact-check by Naomi Sharp.

Special thanks this week to Jeannie Suk Gersen, Sam Moyn, Anna Sale, Liliana Maria Percy Ruiz, Dana Sussman, Johanna Shoen, Erika Christensen and Garin Marschall.

The More Perfect team also includes Emily Botein, Whitney Jones, Salman Ahad Khan and Emily Madray. 

The show is sound designed by David Herman and mixed by Joe Plourde. 

Theme by Alex Overington, and episode art by Candice Evers. 

If you want more stories about the Supreme Court, go to your podcast app, hit subscribe and scroll back for more than two dozen episodes.

Supreme Court audio is from Oyez, a free law project by Justia and the Legal Information Institute of Cornell Law School.

Support for More Perfect is provided by the Smart Family Fund, and by listeners like you.

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